Alps Germanwings crash: 'One day everyone will know my name'

Mar 29, 2015, 07:29 IST
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Agencies

This is what the co-pilot, who crashed his Airbus in the French Alps killing 150 aboard, had told his ex-girlfriend

Berlin: The Germanwings co-pilot recalled Andreas Lubitz, who crashed his Airbus in the French Alps, killing all 150 aboard on Tuesday, told his ex-girlfriend that “one day everyone will know my name.”

Andreas Lubitz during the Airport Hamburg 10-mile run in 2009 in Hamburg. Pic/AFP

In an interview, the 26-year-old flight attendant, Maria W, said that when she heard about the crash, she recalled Lubitz telling her last year: “One day I’m going to do something that will change the whole system, and everyone will know my name and remember.”

The black box voice recorder indicates that the 27-year-old locked his captain out of the cockpit on Tuesday and deliberately flew Flight 4U 9525 into a mountainside, French officials say, in what appears to have been a case of suicide and mass killing.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that all the signs were “pointing towards an act that we can’t describe: criminal, crazy, suicidal.”

German prosecutors revealed that searches of Lubitz’s home netted “medical documents that suggest an existing illness and appropriate medical treatment”, including “torn-up and current sick leave notes, among them one covering the day of the crash”.

Romantically involvedMaria flew with Lubitz on European flights for five months last year, during which time they are believed to have been romantically involved.

If Lubitz did deliberately crash the plane, “it is because he understood that because of his health problems, his big dream of a job at Lufthansa, as captain and as a long-haul pilot was practically impossible,” she said.

The pair separated “because it became increasingly clear that he had a problem”, she said adding that at night he would wake up and scream “we’re going down” and was plagued by nightmares.

Lubitz lived with his parents in his small home town of Montabaur in the Rhineland and kept an apartment in Duesseldorf, the city where his plane was bound from Barcelona.